Page:The Whisper on the Stair by Lyon Mearson (1924).djvu/208



has said, somewhere, that the entrance of a woman into a room is like a delicious change of light. And Moore, as everyone knows, is by way of being an expert about women; he is an amateur of women, an amorist. All this being so, his words ought to carry the weight of an authority with them. And in order to demonstrate the truth of his assertion, one has but to note the effect of Jessica Pomeroy upon Valentine Morley.

The entrance of Jessica upon Val’s life had just the effect Moore has described; he had an inner change of light. His inner light, to that time, had been a little drab tinged with blue—a delicate blue, to be sure, but blue nevertheless; blue, conceded to be the color dedicated to dejection and moroseness, ennui and weariness. Somehow, just the sight of Jessica, the knowledge of being in the same world with her, had changed his coloring. His inner coloring, the subconscious coloring that Freud might have understood in him, had changed to a pinkish, old-rose tint. Suns were shining, birds were singing their fool heads off, the Giants and Yankees were winning, prohibition didn’t prohibit so terribly much—the golf course of Life was nothing but a long, wide, rolling, undulating, closely cropped fairway, with not a bunker or a ditch Rh